It's easier to launder money with services than goods anyway because you don't need to dispose of excess merchandise to make the books balance. Like if you want to claim to have sold 10000 cans of soda despite only selling 1000, you need to buy 10000 cans of soda or even the most superficial review of your accounts will reveal the scheme. The ideal laundering mechanism is a service with a high ratio of price to variable cost, like car washes or laundromats, because then it's easier to overstate income without needing to jump through hoops to overstate the matching costs.
These days, it's almost trivial to launder via wash trades with the proliferation of online services with effectively zero marginal costs. e.g., setting up a freelancer account and a separate business account on some platform like Upwork and then hiring yourself. So I'd be surprised to see anyone laundering via sale of goods unless they are deeply incompetent or it's an opportunistic scheme of some sort (i.e., they are exploiting a unique opportunity that pops up).
I was thinking the other day that self-storage facilities seem ideal: you don't even need to account for discrepancies in utility usage, as in missing water at car washes and laundromats. Just say units are rented and paid in cash. Not aware of any KYC laws but haven't looked recently.
There are no KYC laws for self storage because it's already standard practice so you can sue the person who pays cash for one month of storage and then crams the locker floor to ceiling with hazmat.
Makes sense. Also would probably hit into full occupancy pretty quickly. I guess you could use it as a warehouse for black market goods or something too though.
Great theory lesson, but… You are basing all of this on a non cash world. Cash is still king in many parts of society that aren’t entirely on the up and up. These are the OGs of this sport and definitely aren’t incompetent. Plus sale of goods is very easy to fake if you have multiple parts of the vertical covered. things don’t make sense if you’ve never done them.
Depends on what you want to launder. Drugs are paid for in cash, so you need to launder cash - and the best way to do that is to have a business that does some amount of cash legally. I can imagine vending machines being useful here.
You are right about needing to buy cans that you can then pretend to have sold. Unless of course you order from a supplier who is willing to write an invoice for a higher number of cans than he has sold you. I assume a more competent group would also own the supplier (though not, perhaps, on paper).
You sell a can of soda for $50 and include a gram of cocaine. I don't know what cocaine sells for but that is how you make it work.
more often this is done not in soda which has a street price that you can't get absurb values on. Better to sell a custom leather purse which can sell for a lot but you can make a junk one for almost nothing.
I have always wondered if some of that audiophile gear is to hide transactions of illegal goods.
"If you buy this $600 cable and include the code CC in the order we will make sure to ship it with some white powdery desiccant packages included to protect the cable"
I mean not all of it, there are enough people with more money than brains to keep the legitimate(hah, right. I guess as legitimate as these sort of companies get) companies around. But sometimes you see a product priced so outrageous, you think there has to be something else going on.
These days, it's almost trivial to launder via wash trades with the proliferation of online services with effectively zero marginal costs. e.g., setting up a freelancer account and a separate business account on some platform like Upwork and then hiring yourself. So I'd be surprised to see anyone laundering via sale of goods unless they are deeply incompetent or it's an opportunistic scheme of some sort (i.e., they are exploiting a unique opportunity that pops up).